Analysis: Online Public Affairs and Public Media

As part of the discovery phase for an upcoming project, I put together an analysis of public television stations and their web experiences around public affairs. If public TV can mobilize together, there are potentially huge opportunities to harness the boots-on-the-ground quality of the system. With over 60% of stations already producing some public affairs content, there’s a true network to be leveraged. Here are a few of the findings:

Of stations producing local N/PA content

• 79% of stations present this content in *some* format on their websites (this includes many local NPR instances)
• 50% of stations have a news destination of some type on their sites

Of station with news destinations (58)

• 9 are currently using COVE, PBS’s enterprise video platform (see video.pbs.org)

Most common content partners

1. NPR
2. BBC World
3. PRI
4. Reuters localized feed (via PI news tool)
5. MHz
6. PBS World
7. NYTimes.com
8. Democracy Now!
9. Local Newspaper (varied)
10. France24

Some real standouts

1. http://www.azpbs.org/horizon/index.php
2. http://www.kcet.org/socal/
3. http://tv.azpm.org/kuat/arizonaillustrated/
4. http://www.wvpubcast.org/news.aspx

Mashup of major PBS markets with producing stations